 The first company up is Lateral Labs and the Ministry of Children and Family Development Sharon Armstrong. Lateral Labs is Vancouver based and they are a full service app and web development consulting firm that builds software and uses the principles of user centric design, high adaptability and future maintenance. They work with clients to optimize workflows and create disruptive innovations. We like that and explore the untapped possibilities by using new tech. So Derrick, Derrick Yao and Sharon you can come up to the stage and they will run you through today's first presentation. Hi, so we're here to talk about our in-care placement mapper. It's been a great pleasure to work with Derrick and the folks at Lateral Labs on this really exciting initiative. For years in the field we've used manual methods such as whiteboards and spreadsheets to track placement vacancy information in communities across the province, a process that is obviously slow and cumbersome. Social workers have been asking for an easier way to access information about placement options so that their focus can be on the actual work that they signed up for, social work, direct work with families. Our challenge statement was to develop a web-based system that could remedy this. And the challenge statement is in the first slide there. With representatives from a variety of divisions within the Ministry of Children and Family Development and with our service providers this vision statement was created to create a bed inventory management tool that provides real-time information on bed availability to support matching children in care with the best available housing option. So when we first started working with the Ministry there was a lot that we needed to learn about the process and about how to work together and about what the social workers currently do and how we could create a tool that adapts to them rather than forcing them to adapt to a tool. So we held a series of discovery sessions to just figure that out and talk with Sharon and different stakeholders about that. In that discovery session we came up with a few personas and a few workflows and some screenshots for a tool that we think could potentially help. So here's an example of... The personas and roles. So through the use of the focus groups, with the Ministry of Children and Family Development resourced social workers and with some of our contracted service providers who operate the placements we identified the main uses of the system along with their personas and roles. So a resourced social worker, it's in blue, is a social worker who explores placement options for children in government care. A resourced social worker home liaison, or RSWH in green, is a resourced social worker assigned to liaise with certain placement options and the matching of children to be placed in those beds. A service provider in pink is a contractor funded by the Ministry of Children and Family Development who provides placement options for children in government care. This is an example of a journey framework used to map out the workflow of the various system users and it's built on the personas and roles that we just talked about. And we'll be going through a little bit of this later in the demo. Sharon, you want to talk a bit about these? So we wanted the system to display the unique features of the places of service operated by each of the contracted service providers and through focus groups and feedback we developed posies, place of service indicators. Examples of these are language spoken in the home, pet accommodation and the ability to manage specific behaviors. We also wanted the system to distinguish the unique care needs of the children without identifying them. So we came up with some BIs which stands for bed identifiers and these relate to physical health, mental health, behavioral and developmental features specific to each child. So really these are meant for the social workers to be able to search placements easier with different criteria as well as sort of give some more information about the child they're trying to place without identifying the child specifically for privacy concerns. These are just a few sketches that our designer made some low fidelity wire frames that we were thinking through different ways to represent data and different ways to represent a dashboard of sorts or a search panel so that it would be easier for social workers to find what they're looking for. We utilized the Agile Framework to guide our project well known in the tech industry but not so much within the Ministry of Children and Family Development, lots of learning. This framework promotes solutions evolving through collaborative and iterative effort and it means the ability to move from vision to a minimum viable product in a very short time, less than 16 weeks in this case. The MVP contains as many core features as possible within the short time frame and I'd also like to say that there's been some real mutual learning so I think the folks at Lateral Labs have been involved in such a meaningful project that's going to make a big difference for children and youth in the province of BC and for the Ministry we've learned we can be really innovative in our approach and that we can problem solve in different ways than we are used to using. Absolutely, as an app development firm we've done a lot of projects with a lot of different types of companies but this is the first time working directly with government and specifically with the Ministry of Children and Family it's been sort of a heartwarming experience in a sense because we know that the work that we're doing hopefully will ultimately lead to potentially a placement of a child which is a pretty big deal in my mind. So it was a pleasure for us and our staff working on this and yeah, so that's been great. We're going to give you a quick demo of this. So if I could, thank you. I'm going to have Laurel here to drive the demo. We're going to do our best here with what we have. I need to tap to the first. Sorry, we're just going to set up here. Even super smart people with technology. I just feel a lot better. I actually think it's because it's the PC. It does make a difference, yes. So this demo is going to start, it's a little bit interesting because we've got three different roles represented here. So we've got the blue role here and on the top right corner you see Sam internal that represents a resource social worker so that's someone who's trying to place a child. On a separate window which we've colored with green just so that it's easier to represent. You see Kenny G up there and he's the resource social worker home liaison and they're the one responsible for liaising with the service providers and so they'll be doing a bunch of approvals and things like that. And then on the third tab in pink there just again for color reasons we have Jane Business and she represents a service provider with the province that would help take care of these children. So real quick we'll start with Sam internal and this is an example of a quick interface he might see in searching for a placement. He may look for something in Abbotsford say for example on the he can put in the start date and then click the search button when the internet finally crawls out. Okay so we have some internet problems here but otherwise that's good so we've got a quick dashboard now here this is a search panel that the social worker might see almost similar to how what they would expect from a commercial booking site and it helps to inventory all the different places of service that are available. On the side there on the left filter results those are the posi tags that Sharon had been talking about and it helps to filter down results so say for example we might look for a place that's dog friendly just because we like dogs and that should further pair the list down and we can continue to you know keep pairing the list down so we're satisfied but it seems like the first one there looks like it'll do for us. So this place of service seems to take care of a lot of different things that we have a bit more meta information about that place of service over there that's fed in from different government sources as well. If we're happy with this we can see there's one available bed right now so we can add that and there we go and if we open our current request we can see that that has been added to our request if we wanted we could go back and keep you know short listing more and more things but we're probably happy with this for now so we could add a few BI tags which Sharon was talking about which are bed indicator tags these help to identify or give some more information about the child without actually identifying who they are and this helps the service providers and different people to better understand how to take care of them. So we can submit that request. It's great. So now Sam sees that it's awaiting approval from his RSWH which is a KNEG and so we'll be switching over to that tab and if Kenny clicks on the incoming requests he'll see the places of service he's responsible for clicking on that he would see the request that Sam gave and an approval process there so it says he's approving approval he'll just go ahead and prove that which now goes through a chain because now it hits the service provider so when we go to Jane business that pink tab here and hit on my requests there we go so now we see there's a pending request for Jane to approve and she will also approve and that will then allow the service provider and the resource social worker to kind of have a call and talk to each other and if everything is good and the placement is confirmed then Kenny G here will go back to just right there so now she will just approve the discussion and we do see that that request is approved so this is really good Sam if you go back to Sam's tab and hit my requests you will see now that it is an approved request there and yeah this is just a very simple workflow but it just kind of illustrates how we could sort of digitize the very manual process that all these sites are doing and overall what this will help us do in the future is gather data and data is really important because with the data we can then do lots of different things like predict how much supply we might need and or do reports on utilization and cater specific services towards different children things like that so yeah I think that's the quick demo we have do you have anything else? I just wanted to say that so all of that can happen quite quickly and once people get familiar with the system it will be a couple of minutes and it will pop the placement options that's actually a process that can take hours if not an entire day right now so this is going to cut curtail that work yeah so aside from just cutting the time the more important thing is actually the sharing of information so that there's now one central repository for all the different jurisdictions of social workers look at and so they can look at just like one single source of truth rather than all have their own whiteboards which are not in sync and that's a good point that I didn't speak to but one of the great pieces about this eventually is going to be the data pool that different levels of government can do inside the Ministry of Children and Family Development for example if our minister wants to know how many places of service we have in this contracted continuum she can plug in the entire province and up will pop all of that information so that's it for us thank you so much I just hurt my neck and is it just alt-tabbing? I know we don't need to pull it back off the does that adage in tech fail fast? so that's what I'm doing right now we just need to pull that back off the screen that's what we were doing earlier awesome there we go it was there there we go okay thanks for that thanks for the help so thanks Derek and Sharon this project is it's so real and you can see the clear benefit of how this can help out to Sharon's point about going from maybe spending a whole day trying to make this decision to having that information at your fingertips right away certainly I think we can all appreciate how that sense of urgency is important when you're dealing with children